Exercising for Excellence: Delivering Successful Business Continuity Management Exercises

Do the members of your nominated crisis management team (CMT) understand their roles and responsibilities? Do they understand the tools available to support effective delivery of a timely response? Does your call-cascade system work? Do you even have a call-cascade? Would your senior executives prefer to find the answers to these questions during a major incident or in the controlled environment of an exercise? If you have responsibility for planning and delivering exercises to test your organization's incident management capability, then this book will be a welcome addition to your resources. The book provides a straightforward and practical guide for anyone with responsibility for the planning and delivery of business continuity management (BCM) exercises. This how-to book is an insiders guide to conducting successful business continuity exercises. It will enable you to test and evaluate the effectiveness of your current incident management capability and business recovery plans. Written by a leading expert, this book will take you from setting up an exercise programme that suits your circumstances, through planning and implementing an exercise, to reporting and evaluation. The book uses case studies and learning points, and provides sample planning documents all you need to run through your business continuity management system in practice, and to support your compliance with BS 25999, the BCM standard. Plan tests, exercises and simulations should always be challenging. But planning, developing and running them can sometimes seem even more daunting. With the help of this book some of the sting should be taken out of the planning and delivery. Successful exercises will develop your peoples capabilities, and test your technical, logistical, administrative and procedural systems. They can also highlight elements of your planning that are incomplete or need changing. If your plan is in good shape, an exercise will test and prove it, generating high levels of confidence throughout your organization that you are well placed to withstand disruptions. What does the book cover? How to use and implement exercises to identify and define the BCM requirement. Written in a clear, jargon-free style that will be accessible to non-experts in BCM; includes exercises designed specifically to develop and test your organisation's technical, logistical, administrative and procedural systems; contains many real-life case studies from people whose livelihood it is to run such exercises; overcoming the challenge of getting senior management involved in business continuity. Delivering well-run exercises will raise consciousness from the boardroom to the shop floor and help make the work of those in business continuity valued and understood. This book can help you to deliver a well-run exercise that can raise consciousness from the boardroom to the shop floor and help make the work of those in business continuity valued and understood. Above all, an exercise should enable everyone to understand an organization's current incident management capability. It can demonstrate areas of strengths but can also highlight elements of your planning that are incomplete or need changing. As such, an exercise can be a powerful argument for additional top-down engagement and resources. If your plan is in good shape an exercise will generate high levels of confidence throughout your organization that you are well placed to withstand the impact of disruptions. This book can help you to deliver a well-run exercise that can raise consciousness from the boardroom to the shop floor and help make the work of those in business continuity valued and understood. To be read in conjunction with BS 25999.